Word: thickness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Gleason looked back. "When the last dump went off there was a single column of black smoke that went straight up with the most terrific sound you ever heard ... a black column 100 yards thick holding up the overcast like a pillar." Gleason's destroyers joined the horde of China's fleeing homeless. Six people sprawled, exhausted, on the last bridge along their retreat. Gleason's men dragged them off, blew the bridge and hurried...
...crusader from birth, the magazine has been in the thick of the hurly-burly of U.S. invention. Through its Manhattan editorial office trooped Morse, Gatling, the Maxim brothers, Edison, many another great inventor. Scientific American used to maintain a patent advice agency which, besides giving the magazine many a news scoop, presided benevolently over inventors, encouraging the sincere, diligently exposing the fakers. (Typical case: a "perpetual motion" machine which baffled everybody until Scientific American's editors X-rayed it, discovered inside a clocklike apparatus which could be wound by key through a simulated worm-hole...
...film is a lucid composite of several missions against sources of anything from Heinkels to ball bearings. It gives much the impression of a single day's work. The flight itself, the mortal moment when the bombers, committed to their target, are locked defenseless in their courses, the thick flakiness of flak and the grim-gay dialogue between gunners and pilots-these things have already been paralleled in the memorable Memphis Belle. But the preparation, the aftermath, the cold exactitude and inflexibility of purpose, the extraordinarily various and forceful individuality and professionalism...
...looked as if we were up against it," wrote Lieut. Such to his wife Eve in Beckenham, Kent, "when I suddenly remembered your lock of hair in my pocket. Yours was four-thousandths of an inch thick and dead-black. So four strands were fixed on four of my fine needles-it took me hours-and the surgeon, who is a marvelous chap, let me watch your hair sewing up chaps' nerves in the head. Today there are four men walking around with your hair in their heads...
...chiefly as a fast-growing porch vine. But southern farmers now cultivate it as a field plant to cover eroding soil. Planted from "crowns" (roots and buds), it spreads quickly, putting down new roots like strawberry runners. Its big leaves, shed each fall, eventually cover the ground with a thick, flaky carpet like a forest floor. Because it may be winterkilled by hard frosts, it has so far been grown only in the South, but the Department of Agriculture is trying to breed hardier strains...